The Pretend Wife (22 page)

She opened the container of cookies and put them on the coffee table in front of me.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Oh, Gwen,” she said, “I'm so sorry.”

I knitted faster. “Please don't say that. Don't give me your sympathy. My husband cheated on me with one of my best friends. Nobody died. So let's not be melodramatic.”

She sat down, not sure what to do now. She'd come prepared to give her sympathy, but I'd refused it and now
it was just an unopened box sitting between us. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“Are you going to talk to him? I know he'd love to talk to you.” I assumed that this was part of her mission. Had she talked to Peter at length? Was he trying to turn this whole thing around?

“I'm in the middle of a conversation that has suddenly come to an end,” I said.

She stared at me, unsure of what this meant exactly. “Helen would like to talk to you too,” she said, but she was more sheepish about this. I assumed that Helen had made her promise that she'd give me this message, but she wasn't so sure that Helen deserved it.

“Tell Helen that for his birthday, I suggest she get him a pair of suede buck golf shoes. That's what he needs.”

“I don't think they're going to be exchanging birthday gifts.”

“Why not?” I said, not sure if I was being as sarcastic as I sounded. “They should make a go of it. They're perfect for each other.”

She sat back in the cushions and sighed. “I just can't believe it,” she said. “It's so awful. It's so ugly and unnecessary. What the hell were they thinking? Why are they such selfish idiots? I'm just so furious.” She punched the sofa cushion with her fist. This got my attention. I looked at her, really, for the first time. She looked like hell. Her eyes were red-rimmed, like she'd been crying. All the makeup had been wiped away except for two soft gray smears around her eyes. I felt sorry for her, sitting there in her coat, her oversized pocketbook on the floor between her boots. “I don't deserve to be pissed, not like you do. And I'm not trying to take one single ounce of that anger
away from you,” she said. “But I am so pissed—at both of them.”

I realized that this must be hard on her, truly. It had to have upended some of the things that she believed about marriage, or at least made her lose her footing. I was never sure how confident she was in her own marriage—a marriage that had always seemed to me to be a pairing of opposites. I found myself in the strange position of comforting her. “It's going to be okay. Don't worry. We weren't ever that strong.”

“Really?” she said. “You had me fooled. I thought you two were so tight, such a unified force. I always admired how easy you made it look. Not like my marriage. We're always fuming and bickering …”

“We didn't have enough to fume and bicker about. Maybe that was the problem.” I thought of Elliot's mother, the way she'd told me that marriage was a crock, but love wasn't. I said, just as she had, “I was a damaged girl. I made a damaged decision.”

Faith leaned forward. “What do you mean?”

“I shouldn't have married him in the first place.”

“Do you really believe that?” she said.

I nodded.

“You two were happy. You were best friends.”

“We were friends, but not confidants.”

She took this in, maybe wrestling with the question of whether she and Jason were friends or confidants. What was their level of intimacy? Were they in danger? She stood up and walked among the piles of clothes and blankets. She reached down and picked up a stack of sweaters, let her hands run over the uneven stitches. She put the pile down in one of the empty boxes, and then picked up some mittens and wedged them into the box as well. This
made me bristle, but I didn't want to tell her to stop. She had nervous energy. She was trying to help.

“Peter and I had portions of our lives that were roped off from each other,” I said, trying to explain. “It didn't just start with the affair with Helen.”

“Do you think he had other affairs? He swore to me that he didn't.”

“No,” I said, frustrated. “That's not it. We were cordoning ourselves off. We didn't share what we were thinking. We made little decisions every day to keep parts of ourselves separate. We roped off one area and then another and then another until we had lovely banter. Banter that could go on and on.”

“You were so funny together,” she said. “I loved your lovely banter.”

“But finally we ended up living side-by-side lives. That's what made it possible for him to have an affair.”

She stuffed a few tassel-topped hats into the box. I knew that I would take everything out of the box as soon as she was gone, but I let her feel useful in this small gesture. “I just didn't know. I guess no one can really know another couple's relationship.”

“I don't think Peter and I knew either, if that's any consolation.”

She'd packed the box tight then walked to her bag. She pulled out a picture frame and handed it to me. “Here,” she said.

I let the knitting fall to my lap and I took the photograph. It was, of course, the photograph that Vivian had given me as a gift—Elliot, Jennifer, and Vivian in the yard, the gauzy curtain. I'd forgotten that I'd told her about it, but I had, in the creamery, while I was trying to really explain what had happened, and had failed.

“You said it made you feel better, stronger. It made you feel watched over. I thought you might need that right now.”

I wasn't sure what to say. I looked up at her. “I can't believe you remembered,” I said. “Thank you.”

“I hope it helps,” she said, and she picked up her bag, readying to go. “Are you in love with Elliot?” she asked, and then she held up her hand. “Don't answer. You don't have to answer that. That's just what Pete said, but I didn't come here for that.”

I didn't answer. “Did you come for some other reason than dropping off my things?” I asked.

“To make sure that you were okay.”

“Am I okay?” I asked.

She patted the box's lid. “I don't know.”

“Neither do I.”

T
HE SNOW CAME AND
went, leaving muddy ice frozen in shady patches on the front lawn. I sat in the flickering glow of the television, but I didn't watch it. I knitted, and while knitting sometimes the yarn would go blurry, and a tear would roll down my nose onto my busy fingers, and I would cry for a while, but keep working.

Why did I keep knitting? I felt oddly useful, like a small machine, and though my heart felt rather dead, my hands didn't. They kept making, creating. The skeins of yarn took shape one stitch at a time.

And the photograph sat in its frame propped on the end table. Sometimes I stole glances at it. Sometimes I'd pick it up and take in the details again—the rippling water, Jennifer's plump baby face, Vivian's long, elegant legs, Elliot's bowed knees and swim trunks, the muddy fishing rods. But usually I simply knew it was there, keeping watch. The photograph was mine now. It had not only found me through Vivian's generosity and Faith's thoughtfulness—love and friendship—it had also seemed to come home.

My father made my meals—his usual inelegant dishes. He watched television, sitting beside me on the sofa. At one point he told me that I looked flushed. “Do you want to take your temperature?”

I shook my head.

Sometimes he would point to the TV screen and make some benign comment like, “Will you look at that?”

I'd look up and stare and nod, but not really absorb it. I was tired, mainly, exhausted, as if I hadn't slept for years.

One afternoon I fell asleep, and woke up to a knock at the front door. I called my father, but he didn't answer. I looked out the bay window. His car was gone. Instead there was a blue pickup truck parked at the curb and a man I'd never seen before standing on the stoop. I looked back at the truck. A small figure was moving in the passenger's seat, but I couldn't make out the person. In the back of the truck, there was what looked to be a cello in a black case.

He knocked again then stood back from the house with his hands in his pockets and looked at the upper windows. He started walking back to the truck, but then the passenger froze, then rolled down the window.

It was Bib.

Her bony frame and small pinched face appeared. She stuck her body out of the open window and waved to me. She'd spotted me there, watching. My heart swelled. Bib! I was so glad to see her I felt like shouting her name and running out into the yard.

The man turned back around, and I decided this must be Sonny, Jennifer's husband, the drummer. Why was he toting a cello? I wasn't sure. But Bib took my breath. Bib was here. Bib had appeared and was now kicking open the passenger door and swooping toward the house, arms
outstretched, like one of those nesting eagles she was so afraid of. Maybe she would lift me off the earth, not like a twenty-pound sheep to eat, no. Maybe she would lift me right up off the earth, to save me! Just like that!

I ran to the door, opened it wide, and stepped onto the cold stoop in my bare feet. The sun blinded me. Bib was tripping toward me. She hugged me around the waist so hard I had to grab the wrought-iron handrail.

After a moment, she said, “We've got an invitation for you. You have to come! It all went to sleep!”

“What went to sleep? What are you saying, Bib?”

“It all went to sleep! The bad stuff is sleeping!” she said.

“She's trying to tell you that Vivian is in remission,” the man said.

“That's amazing!” I said, and I thought of Vivian, revived, sitting up in her bed, her cheeks pink. Was she eating again? Was she reading now to herself, books she loved? I felt more than a wave of relief. I was flooded with it. “Is she doing well? How does she look? Is she still weak?”

“She's gaining back her strength, slowly but surely. She's stunned all the docs. They're not sure what to do.”

I shook my head. I was speechless. I thought of how she believed in miracles, but only because, as she put it, she didn't have a choice in the matter. I imagined her in a field with an enormous rake of her own, her own brand of bravery.

“The doctors are embarrassed because they were wrong!” Bib said.

Sonny introduced himself, striding forward, hand outstretched. He was barrel-chested, bigger than I'd expected, but handsome and warm.

We shook hands. “I figured it was you,” I said. “I'm Gwen.”

“I know,” he said. “I've been sent on a mission to find you.”

“And we did!” Bib said. “We did find you!”

“Actually, Bib did,” Sonny said. “Elliot said you might have gone to your dad's house, but he only knew that he lived in town, and he's not in the phone book.” He glanced at the front hedges, as if he knew he was getting close to a subject about which he shouldn't have known as much as he did—how I left my husband and retreated. I was surprised to hear Elliot's name, though I shouldn't have been, but some part of me clung to his name—I loved hearing it on someone else's lips. “Bib remembered everything you told her about growing up—the name of the street you grew up on and the color of the house and the name of the neighbors, who had their name on their mailbox, which helped. The Fogelmans.”

“Wow, did I tell you all of that?” I asked Bib.

“When I was crying,” Bib said. “To make me think of something except crying.”

“Nice house,” Sonny said.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked, hopping from foot to foot to relieve the stinging cold on my feet.

“No, no. That's okay,” Sonny said. “We don't want to intrude—”

Bib cut him off. “We have an invitation for you!” Bib said. “To the lake house! We're having an un-funeral.”

“An un-funeral?”

“Vivian's idea,” Sonny said. He pulled a white card out of his jacket pocket then. “She wanted to make sure this found its way to you.”

“So you're on a mission from Vivian?” I asked. I'd assumed that Elliot had sent them.

“Yes,” Sonny said, reading the hint of disappointment in my voice. “But I know Elliot would love to see you there.”

“Come! You have to come! We're having un-lilies and un-cake and un-eulogies! It's going to be un-sad!”

I looked at the invitation, turned it over in my hands.
Elliot. Elliot.
“Thank you,” I said. “I'll think about it. I'll try.”

 

My father came home, carrying a stack of papers under one arm and his ancient leather briefcase—another widower's item, like his bathrobe, something a wife would have replaced a decade ago—and found me sitting on the sofa, holding the invitation and its white envelope.

I knew that I couldn't let myself go to the un-funeral. Not yet. I was still sorting through loss. I knew it would take a long time. But right now, before I took another step forward in my life, I needed to find the deepest loss, to un-earth it, hold it up to the light, in the open air, to see what I could find there.

“I want you to take me to the bridge,” I said.

He sensed my urgency. “Now?” he asked.

“Yes, now.”

 

We drove for about fifteen minutes out of town and finally we were winding along back roads. We were silent in the car. My father has always been respectful of grief, in his way.

Eventually I saw a stone bridge up ahead, the river
running beneath it. My father pulled over onto the shoulder so deeply that my side of the car was blocked by brush. It was impossible to use the door. He left his door open and I slid across the seat and got out that way.

It was bitterly cold. A wind was whipping up off the river, which was choppy under the bridge's lights. I waited for some feeling to overtake me—some memory of that night to rise up in stark realism. I waited to feel closer to my mother, to understand her, to have some sudden insight.

None came.

I looked at the bridge's sturdy pilings and the water below. “How was it possible?” I asked. “It's all so impenetrable now. No one could possibly drive into the water.”

“They've made it quite safe, haven't they?”

I stood there, staring down into the water then up at the sky. My cheeks were stiffened with cold. “Your theories on love are all about safety,” I said.

“My theories on love? I don't have any theories on love,” he said modestly.

“Yes, you do,” I said. “You loved her and you lost her, and from then on, you decided to be careful with love. You couldn't ever really hand it over with an open heart, not even fully to me. You closed up shop,” I said.

He looked out across the river, his eyes shining with tears. “I wish I'd done better by you,” he said. “You just reminded me of her so much …”

I knew it must have been hard. I knew it even then when I was a child, which is why I'd never pushed him before to talk about any of this. I'd never pushed him before I met Elliot, in fact. It was beginning to dawn on me how much Elliot had changed me, how he'd opened something up inside of me, and now I needed answers. “You taught
me to only be able to accept love like that, in small doses. You taught me to be afraid of overpowering love—the kind that, if you lose it, that loss can destroy you.”

He shook his head angrily. It was the first time I'd seen my father really angry in as long as I could remember. He grabbed my arm. “No, Gwen,” he said. “I don't believe in that kind of love. I'd do it all again. I'd fall in love with your mother a hundred times over. The way I loved her, that was the way to love.” He looked away and let his hand slide from my arm.

“But it destroyed you,” I said. “Didn't it? Look at your life!”

Just like that his anger was gone. He smiled weakly and shook his head. Did he know what his life looked like to people on the outside? “I keep on loving her,” he said, “because I'm afraid if I stop, I'll forget her. And I can't ever let that happen. But I don't believe in, how did you just put it? Love in small doses? I don't believe in loving safely.”

There was a distant horn. We both looked up. The wind kicked up my hair. I brushed it out of my face and held it back with one hand. “What kind of love do you believe in?” I asked, in almost a whisper.

“The overpowering kind.” He paused and then said, “You're right. I do have theories on love, but I never told you them.”

“I assumed them, and I was wrong.” We were lit for a brief moment in the headlights from an oncoming car. It passed. “I got all of them backwards.”

“I guess so,” he said, shuffling one of his shoes in the roadside gravel. “Are you really in love with Peter?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “He cheated on me
and I hate him for that, but it was always love in small doses with him. From the beginning.”

“Are you in love with someone else?” I knew this was a nearly impossible question for him to have asked. He would consider this, under normal circumstances, to be more than prying. It would seem like barging in, doors flung open wide, holding a searchlight on someone's private life. But he knew that things were different between the two of us now, and we had to ask hard questions. I didn't realize how desperately I'd wanted him to ask me a question like this, intimate and direct, until this moment.

“I'm in love with Elliot Hull,” I said.

“The professor of philosophy? The thinker?” He smiled.

I nodded.

“Well,” he said. “Life is a tangle.”

“I guess it is.”

“I suggest you not play it safe,” he said.